1. Technical Field
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relate to menu display for easily and quickly searching for contents shared by a plurality of devices in a home network.
2. Related Art
Related art developments in network communications technology allow a plurality of devices to share a considerable amount of content with one another via a network. Thus, related art research has focused on easily and quickly finding content of interest among a large amount of content.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a related art menu display method. When a user manipulates a mouse or a keyboard, a current menu screen is switched from a first menu screen 11, which displays a plurality of menus related to a list of a plurality of devices, to a second menu screen 12, which displays a plurality of menus related to a plurality of content types into which contents of the devices are classified. Thereafter, when the user further manipulates the mouse or the keyboard, the current menu screen is switched from the second menu screen 12 to a third menu screen 13, which displays a list of contents belonging to one of the menus displayed on the second menu screen 12, and respective detailed information.
However, if a considerable number of devices need to be represented by the related art menu display method, and each of the devices contains a considerable number of contents, menus related to a list of the devices or a list of the contents may not be able to be displayed on the same menu screen. To search for a device of interest or a content of interest, a user may have to scroll up or down a considerable number of times. For example, if thousands of devices are represented by the related art menu display method and a maximum number of menus that can be displayed on one menu screen provided by the related art menu display method is 10, a user may have to scroll up or down several hundreds of times to search for a device or a content of interest.
Thus, the related art menu display method is time-consuming when a contents list includes a considerable number of contents entries. In addition, the user must memorize the location of each of the contents in the contents list to quickly search the contents list for the content of interest. Thus, without knowing the exact location of the content of interest in the contents list, the user may not be able to quickly search for the content of interest, even though the user has rapidly accessed the contents list.